Coda

Abstract

This coda explains that Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene has never been read to the end, for the simple reason that no one can quite say where, or if, it ends at all. This peculiar fact—the joint product of biographical accident, editorial intervention, and what might or might not be poetic ingenuity—has consequences for the poem as a whole. To begin with, it makes it unusually difficult to speak of the poem as a whole. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith has written, poetic closure “is an effect that depends primarily upon the reader's experience of the structure of the entire poem.” Because it is dense, difficult, didactic, and strange; because it is an allegory; because its language is pseudoarchaic and its spelling weird; because it meanders and digresses, shedding characters and entire plotlines as it goes; above all, because it is so extraordinarily long, Spenser's poem tests one's readerly loyalties and often defeats one's instinct to see a story through.